Editions

Vivant absolument

4 Oct — 2 Nov 2019 at the Galerie Olivier Waltman in Paris, France

For his new exhibition at the gallery in October 2019, Jérôme Borel will show a new body of work related to the emotions and trauma caused by the Paris attacks of January and November 2015.

The artist remains loyal to his metaphorical language and airy translucence of textures and uses his minimalistic painterly vocabulary to plunge the spectator into the very feelings of these dramas.
Here, none of the shooting scenes of Charlie Hebdo or Bataclan is clearly identifiable. It is rather the motives and pressure of the background sketches that force the public to a brutal confrontation. A stylistic approach meant to make the viewer experience stupefaction… As often in Jérôme Borel’s work, the figure looks like a paradoxical vision, very distant from its primary meaning. The artist aims to make us feel all the emptiness and sideration he felt at the very moment of the public announcements and of the obsessively recurring images that followed for so many days.

In each of his paintings, Julia Garimorth, Chief Conservator and Head of the contemporary collections at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris wrote in 2018, we are struck by the permanent fluctuation between a floating non-representational object and a clearly identified object. It seems that Jérôme Borel questions the very dynamic of perception.